The Heart Has Reasons (19 page)

When I first heard the story of how mrs. bloch behaved after the war, I was stunned by her ingratitude to Clara, as well as her insensitivity to her own child. Over time, I’ve developed a great deal more sympathy for her, having learned about what she must have gone through during and after the war. Truly, as traumatologist Ervin Staub has noted, “extreme and horrible circumstances give rise to extreme and unpredictable emotional reactions.”

For those few Dutch Jews who survived the war, the period immediately following was the time when they learned who had been killed among their family members and friends. Those survivors who had suffered heavy losses often felt that their lives no longer had meaning. As Simon Wiesenthal explains, “They had been spared—but they had no one to live for, no place they could go back to, no pieces to pick up.” Other survivors were faced with agonizing uncertainty as to the fate of those still missing—would they return, or would their names appear on the death rolls? There are stories of Jews who, for years, met every train that arrived from Poland, hoping to find their missing loved ones.

It’s not so hard to understand, then, that Mrs. Bloch, on finding that her only daughter was alive and well, would want her back immediately, and be unable to grasp the effect that might have on the child. Perhaps Mrs. Bloch also feared that Nettie, after having spent her earliest years with Clara, would never really be her daughter again, would never fully see her as her mother.

When the surviving remnant of Dutch Jewry made it back to their homeland, they found, not the stability and comfort for which they had longed, but confusion, disorder, and sometimes callousness. Everyone had their sad stories to tell, and compassion congealed into something like
apathy among the Dutch who, for five long years, had watched the Nazis eviscerate their country. Many Dutch coped with the difficult postwar period by refusing any look backward, steeling themselves against what would have been debilitating sorrow. For the returning Jews, however, the collision between their prewar memories of the place and the postwar realities set off new implosions of grief and anguish.

The larger problem was that Amsterdam—and all of Holland—was like an anthill that had been stomped on for five years. In addition to the more than 100,000 people who had been killed because they were Jews, approximately 23,000 civilians had died in air raids, 18,000 had starved to death during the “hunger winter,” and another 5,000 had succumbed in prisons and concentration camps. Another estimated 50,000 died because of inadequate medical attention owing to the crippled health care system. And what of those 550,000 young men who had been taken away to work for the Germans? 30,000 of them did not return. Total civilian losses during the war came to 237,300—about three out of every one hundred people in a country of 8.8 million.

And so, although the Dutch wildly celebrated the German surrender of 5 May 1945, with it came psychological license to survey the enormity of the damage the Nazis had inflicted. Though Amsterdam was the only city in which the joy of liberation was mixed with the shock of additional German aggression, there was no unmitigated joy to be found anywhere in the Netherlands at that time. Yes, the Dutch kicked up their heels in festivity, but in the private spaces of their lives, in the empty beds and silent kitchens, the specter of their missing loved ones continually loomed.

....

A deeper question remains to be explored about the “hunger winter”: how could the Nazis have been so cruel as to intentionally starve their Nordic cousins, the Dutch, especially after the Dutch had fed so many hungry German and Austrian children at the end of the First World War?

Henri van der Zee, a Dutch historian who lived through the “hunger winter,” recalls some ironic humor from the time that suggests the Dutch themselves were tormented by this question:

“The German children of 1918 are so grateful for the good food they got in Holland that, in 1945, they give every Dutch child
two slices of bread and one potato a day.” This bitter allusion to the flood of German and Austrian children who came to Holland after the First World War and enjoyed Dutch hospitality and kindness was one of the jokes that circulated in the Hunger Winter. But just how deep the resentment was, Captain Lipmann Kessel discovered when . . . a visiting nurse remarked that some of those same German children “are now helping to starve out and destroy the provinces in which they were once guests.”

Certainly the Nazis were doing all kinds of heinous things in the Netherlands. It can be argued that the “hunger winter” was simply the ultimate example of the same exponential formula of retribution they had demonstrated in 1941 by arresting 400 young men after the Resistance had wounded a few Nazis. This time, however, the provocation was the Railway Strike of September 1944 in which tens of thousands of Dutch railway workers, taking their cue from the exiled queen, abandoned their posts. (They continued to receive their salaries from the LO, which, by that time, was being funded by the Dutch government in exile.) The objective was to cripple the Nazis’ ability to transport military supplies and stop their depredation of the country. However, the Nazis then ran the trains themselves, and, as the Railway Strike continued, they gradually stopped transporting food to the Dutch.

A more far-reaching explanation was presaged by American Quaker humanitarian Clarence Pickett. At an address he gave in Philadelphia in October 1940, four years before the Germans began to starve the Dutch, Pickett suggested that, “the Germany which Britain now faces, and of which she so heartily disapproves, is in no small degree the product of the vicious weapon of blockade used during and following the [First] World War. . . . There is yet to be shown an illustration where the starvation of populations has been proved to be a permanent instrument of peace.”

The blockade of World War I may indeed have been a link in the chain that resulted in the Germans starving the Dutch several decades later. Since the time of the Napoleonic Wars, blockades had only been applied to prevent military supplies from entering a country, but in the blockade against Germany during World War I, the Allies also blocked food with the intention of starving out the enemy and ruining the German economy. It worked: Germany was forced to surrender. The Allies then presented the defeated country with the Treaty of Versailles, which stated that Germany was fully responsible
for the war and must pay all war damages. It also lopped off some of Germany’s most valuable territory, reducing it to the size of France, and tightly restricted its military.

The Germans were offended by the allegation that they alone were responsible for the war, as Germany was but one aggressor in “the terrifying momentum of diplomacy” that set World War I in motion. The demand for full reparations was clearly vindictive, for it weighed the country down with a burden of debt it could never throw off. As early as 1928, historian Sidney Fay, in his classic
The Origins of the
World War,
described the Treaty of Versailles as “a dictum exacted by victors from vanquished, under the influence of the blindness, ignorance, hatred, and the propagandist misconceptions to which war had given rise.”

Though Germany objected strenuously to its terms, not having played any role in determining them, the Allies had an insidious weapon at their disposal: the blockade. They kept up the sanctions for seven months after the armistice until the starved and broken country finally acquiesced. The result was immediate unrest within its borders: embittered nationalists began incendiary diatribes, resentment escalated into violence, and a revolution that same year toppled the already crumbing monarchy.

The German economy soon spiraled off into a stratospheric inflation—the exchange rate went from 4.2 marks to a dollar in 1914, to 4.2
trillion
marks to a dollar in 1923. The comic absurdity of this was lost on Germany’s working class, many of whom found themselves unable to feed their children. In 1923, the mayor of Berlin decried that one quarter of the children were malnourished, and that even more were unable to do their schoolwork because of bad health. As the German economy collapsed, France occupied the Ruhr, the richest section of the Rhineland, justifying itself with the allegation that Germany had reneged on its war debts.

In the political instability that followed, Adolf Hitler and his brown-shirted thugs “rose from the ranks of those whom World War I left disenchanted and alienated, with the war still in their bones.” Inge Scholl, who as a college student was part of the White Rose resistance group in Germany, explains, “If a man’s bare existence is undermined and his future is nothing but a gray, impenetrable wall, he will listen to promises and temptations and not ask who offers them.” Indeed, the discontent of millions of unemployed workers was fertile ground for the Nazi philosophy to take root. When a young Adolf
Hitler vowed that under his leadership “the chains of Versailles” would be cast off, the German people listened. Luigi Barzini, a European journalist during the 1930s, recalls that they “honestly hoped Hitler would somehow avenge the honor of their fatherland, restore its pride and dignity and its place in the concert of nations, solve the economic problems, and eventually, one day, unite all Germans under one flag.” Meanwhile, Hitler’s brown-shirts were busy smashing the internal opposition, and, in the process, destroying “every institution that under democracy preserved remnants of human spontaneity.”

Barzini recalls a German cabaret comedian who used to keep silent for a minute or two during his act. He would then say, “Now that we have discussed the political situation, we can talk of something else.” He soon was arrested. As early as 1933, it was clear that the German people had turned themselves over to a regime that, to quote historian Gordon Craig, “was as efficient in the techniques of control as it was ruthless and unconstrained by constitutional or moral considerations in its use of force against opponents.”

As a way of getting around the military restrictions placed on Germany by the treaty, Hitler formed a plethora of diverse police forces, some indistinguishable from military units. When the Great Depression plunged the country into another financial tailspin, he was able to turn it around by creating a war economy, something he accomplished through remilitarization in open violation of the despised treaty.

During the late 1930s, the Allied powers tried to appease Germany, but their new permissiveness, instead of defusing the growing tensions, gave Hitler the impression that he could get away with his plans for expansion, and he cunningly manipulated the Allies using their own belated guilt. One week before attacking Poland, for example, he wrote to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, “The question of the treatment of European problems on a peaceful basis is not a decision which rests with Germany, but primarily with those who, since the crime committed by the Versailles Diktat, have stubbornly and consistently opposed any peaceful revision.”

The arc of this explanation of Clarence Pickett’s thesis began with the starvation of Germany by the Allied forces during the First World War and ends with the starvation of Holland by the German forces during the Second World War. Clearly, the colossal injustices of the naval blockade and the Versailles Treaty at the end of World War I far outweighed any good the humanitarian programs of that time
were able to accomplish. The efforts of the Dutch to feed hungry German children were too little and too late to prevent the trauma that would later reassert itself when the generation of victims grew up to be the generation of perpetrators. Clarence Pickett was a prophet: starving a population does not lead to peace, but to further starvation.

Much attention has been paid to how a charismatic Hitler took control and mesmerized a malleable German people into following him blindly. By following the chain of causation back, we also see how the Allied nations had some part in the creation of the Nazi nightmare.

SIX
~ KEES VEENSTRA ~
JUST THE HUMAN THING TO DO

Should you shield the canyons
from the windstorms, you would never
see the beauty of their carvings.